Daring Canadian Prison Helicopter breakout – Charles D’Alberto

As a helicopter hovers over a prison exercise yard, two convicts cling desperately to an attached rope before – following an almighty struggle – being hoisted to freedom.

The drama unfolded not in a Hollywood film but in Canada’s St Jerome Detention Centre, near Montreal in Quebec, as prisoners Danny Provencal and Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau attempted to flee captivity.

The audacious bid was aided by two accomplices, Billi Beaudoin and Steven Mathieu Marchisio, who hired the helicopter before hijacking it and forcing the pilot to fly to the prison at gunpoint.

Despite its daring nature, the escape did go off without a hitch. Efforts by the two men to use the rope to climb to the roof, where the helicopter had landed, failed – as did an attempt by one of the accomplices to help them as they dangled outside a prison window.

They only got away when the helicopter took off, one of the men breaking a fixture on the prison wall as the aircraft hauled him upwards.

The helicpoter later landed next to a getaway car waiting outside the prison to enable the man to complete their escape.

In the end, their endeavours counted for nothing. All four men were captured within hours.

Footage of the March 17, 2013 incident, filmed by prison security cameras, only came to light this week after it was released by a Canadian court in a trial of Hudon-Barbeau on unrelated charges.

But news of the episode may have spread among Quebec’s prison population. The following year, three men facing murder charges successfully carried out a similar escape from Orsainville Detention Facility in Quebec City. They were re-captured two weeks later.

Helicopter escapes are not unknown elsewhere, including Britain. John Kendall, a gangland boss, and Sydney Draper, a convicted murderer, were sprung from the exercise yard at Gartree prison in Leicestershire in December 1987 using a hi-jacked helicopter.

Kendall was re-captured within 10 days but Draper remained at large for 13 months.